Can you imagine a life where everything always went your way?  A life where no one ever took advantage of you, said bad things about you or made you look bad. A life where circumstances were always in your favor and happiness never faded. Where there was always enough money, always enough love and never a misunderstanding or miscommunication. Just imagine if everything was always fair. Wouldn’t that be great? No sorrow, no grief, no sadness, no worry, no anxiety, no disappointment, no frustration, no anger, …. What a great picture it paints. A Utopian life.  Life all good, all the time. Wouldn’t that be a great life? Isn’t that what…

Ever have those times when you are in the valley of life and everything seems to be turning upside down? Where you feel like everything seems to be going wrong at the same time?  It’s enough that you have to fight one hard battle. But when there are several at the same time, what then?  What do you do when everywhere you turn in your world there are hard circumstances?  How do you keep your spirits up?  How do you keep your faith? I know this experience.  I’ve lived this experience.  Its hard.  Its hard when you are struggling through things that are out of your control.  There are so…

It has been a difficult evening.  I have already cried a bucket of tears and I am sure there will still be more to come in the days ahead.  I believe by divine intervention we found out that my seventeen year old son has an issue with his heart.  What started out as a random doctor checkup a month ago, led to a diagnoses today of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.  Basically, he has a genetic defect in his heart that makes the muscle wall on the left side thicken, making it more difficult for the blood to flow through.  This is the disease that has caused young athletes to drop dead during…

Do you ever feel like you aren’t enough?  Like you aren’t enough to take on the project God is calling you to? Like you aren’t educated enough, influential enough or good enough?  Do you ever feel you aren’t pretty enough or smart enough? It is that ever so basic lie that Satan has used for thousands of years.  God really didn’t say …..  You really aren’t enough….  God really doesn’t do what he says…    It’s the lie that you will never be enough and God will ultimately fail you.  It’s the lie that Satan wants each of us to believe, that we will never be anything significant. I’m going…

Sometime back, I discovered that a statement I have used and taught to others was leading me to an incorrect understanding of biblical truth. So many times I’ve heard taught and repeated the statement “God cannot look on sin.”  The teaching this came from was the concept that God hates sin and Jesus stands as a filter between us and God blocking our sin from his view. What it infers is that somehow God has a weakness. He is flawed. You see I would get this mental picture of sin being kinda like God’s kryptonite. Just like superman having one flaw, God’s was sin. This lead me to believe I…

God has been whispering to me lately about the message that the famous old hymn talks about.  You know the old song I’m talking about, It is well with my soul.  And as he has whispered the question, asking of the condition of my soul, I’ve had to look deeper than surface to find an answer.  To be truthful, my answer has been “not so well, Lord.”  I have let the stresses of life take a toll on my soul and put me in a place where I only wanted to deal with the surface of life. I can tell when my soul is not in a great place because…

Yesterday I posted a video of the song Take me to the King.  Still today I can’t get the words out of my head, the lyrics, they speak straight into me.  I have felt so much like this song lately.  Just needing to hear a word from Jesus. Just needing to feel Him and know He is still in control of things.  Just feeling tired, all churched out, fed up with religion.  Not fed up with Jesus but fed up with the way the world is so messed up and we pretend it isn’t.  Fed up with pretending when I’m really having a bad day.  Fed up with smiling when I really…

I love this song.  Chris Blue sang it on the Voice last season.  I bought the song and have it on my play list. The words are what I feel at times.  Today especially, I just need to see the King.

Are you struggling to find joy today?  Are the disappointments of life dragging you down?  Could you use a little hope? I imagine there were eleven men walking around feeling the same way on this day some two thousand plus years ago.  Eleven disciples, minus the traitor Judus Ascariot had believed in someone.  They had left everything in their lives; their families, their profession, their beliefs; to follow someone they believed to be the chosen Messiah.   And then he was crucified on a cross yesterday. Can you imagine how they must have felt today.  That day over two thousand years ago, the day after the person they put all their…

The other day while at the bookstore I picked up a bible study called “the minor prophets.”   This particular study included six books of the bible; Hosea, Joel, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk and Malachi.  After arriving home, I remember wondering why I had picked that particular study.  I had once, long ago, tried to study the small band of prophets in the back of the old testament.  My time of study hadn’t lasted long and been at all fruitful.  So I wondered to myself, why now would I find myself drawn to this particular study. Today I know why.  I began to study the story of Hosea at the beginning of…